Re: Form text field default & validation

On Mon, 31 Mar 2003, Donna m87 wrote:

> Accessibility demands that a text area field contain default text.

No, that's generally considered as not applicable any more. In other
words, when the WCAG 1.0 guidelines say
"Until user agents handle empty controls correctly, include default,
place-holding characters in edit boxes and text areas."
  (at http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/#tech-place-holders )
this is to read so that it is no more relevant, since user agents handle
empty controls correctly.

> How can I include default information in the text field AND validate
> that same text field?

Simply don't include any "dummy" default text as a placeholder.
But if there is a meaningful default value that helps the user, it should
be included. In that case, it should be acceptable input and there should
be no reason to check against it. (But in general, it is possible to check
that a form field value is different from a its initial value, at least by
explicitly comparing it against a fixed value.)

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Monday, 31 March 2003 14:40:17 UTC